Certain communication networks, including wired or wireless communication networks, may use the Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) communications protocol to resolve contention for shared access to a communication channel. For example, if two nodes of a network attempt to communicate on the same communications channel at the same time, this may lead to a collision, which may be prevented by assigning an exclusive time slot to each node. However, with such exclusively assigned times slots the communication channel resource may be under utilized if either of the two nodes do not communicate during their exclusively assigned time slot.
Another approach used for shared channel access is the Carrier Sense Multiple Access (CSMA) communication protocol, in which network nodes listen and wait for a free channel before they attempt to communicate. However, if one node has a high priority message (sometimes referred to as a low latency message) to send, and another node is accessing the channel to send a low priority message, then the node with the high priority message to send may be required to wait until the node that is sending the low priority message is finished sending the low priority message before the high priority message may be sent.